Social media has time and time over shown itself able to generate incredible marketing results for brands. Many new companies have been built on the back of Instagram and are now worth millions of dollars, and at the same time, it allows some of the world’s largest brands such as Coca-Cola and Nike to reach out to their audience, and interact with them.
You can almost think of social media as a Swiss army knife for marketers. It’s a universal marketing tool which can be used in so many different ways to help marketers generate results within a whole array of marketing areas. Despite this, for the vast majority of brands and marketers that are leveraging social media, only a few of the tools in the knife are being used. The rest are being neglected and forgotten.
What do I mean by this?
Well, today, most marketers use social media as a promotional tool – a tool which they leverage to drive more sales. That’s it. In other words, they use social media for one purpose and one purpose only: sales.
But those that are only using social media for driving sales are missing out on a ton of opportunities, and they sure aren’t getting the most out of social media. And worst of all, the best way to drive marketing results with social media isn’t by focusing on driving sales. In fact, it is the worst method. That’s because people’s psychology on social media isn’t to buy things. Despite this, the vast majority of brands on social media have the mindset ”sell, sell sell”, and people are doing everything they can to dodge the promotions. Also, because everyone is doing it, it means that in order to stand out from the crowd and cut through the noise, you need to think and do differently.
Where am I going with this?
Well, as mentioned, social media is a universal marketing tool which can be leveraged in a ton of different ways – all dependent on how you use it, and one of those ways is to build brand awareness using social media.
The fact is that this is one of the marketing metrics that brands focus on the least, and many just don’t think about creating a strategy to drive results and work on it – despite building brand awareness having proven to be a valuable marketing metric that can help drive amazing marketing results long-term.
As such, because everyone is talking about how you can use social media to drive sales, this isn’t something that I am going to focus on in this article. instead, I will be digging deep into something within social media marketing that isn’t very widely spoken about when discussing social media as a marketing tool. In this article, We’ll look at how to build brand awareness using social media, and how you can benefit from building brand awareness long-term, as opposed to focusing on driving short-term results, such as sales.
With the enormous user-base that social media has, which is continuing to grow at a rapid pace, it means that you can now reach virtually anyone, anywhere in the world. This massive potential reach on social media also means that there is an enormous number of people who you can impact with your brand’s message, and this build brand awareness using social media.
Since few people are talking about working to build brand awareness, I have a lot to cover, so let’s dig right in.
What is brand awareness?
According to Wikipedia, brand awareness is ”the extent to which consumers are familiar with the qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or services.”.
Brand awareness is the customer awareness of a company’s existence, but the thing is that, as mentioned, branding plays a central role. The reason is that brand awareness also measures customers’ ability to recognize a brand image and associate it with a certain company’s product or service.
This is why, when working with branding, you also work with building brand awareness.
Branding and brand awareness go hand-in-hand with each other. The reason is that branding is more about how your audience associate with your brand – how they perceive your brand, and building brand awareness is more about locking down how you want people to think of your brand, and then making sure they associate your brand with various branding elements, such as your logo or slogan.
As such, this is the reason why I’ll touch upon branding as well in this article, but I’ll mainly focus on how you build brand awareness using social media.
Why is it important to build brand awareness?
There are many reasons you should build brand awareness, but there are even more reasons to build brand awareness using social media.
First off, brand awareness is getting increasingly important as a brand to be able to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
By having a distinct voice, tone, and feel, your customers will be able to instantly distinguish your company from your competitors.
This is extremely important because if you don’t have anything that makes you stand out from the crowd and make an impact, you’ll never be able to build customer loyalty since you have nothing that makes you stand out from the rest and become remembered.
Furthermore, brands with strong branding are more trusted than other brands on marketing. Through building brand awareness and establishing a strong brand, they are not only able to establish themselves in the industry, but also acquire and build loyal customers. Brand awareness is so powerful that it can be the difference of what can of soda they pick in the store, or what bag of chips you choose. When you really think about it, branding is an extremely powerful variable that greatly affects how we as consumers shop and those brands that focus on building brand awareness are the ones that benefit immensely from it. Just think about how the vast majority of people choose Red Bull when they are going to buy an energy drink or a Coca-Cola as opposed to Pepsi when they want soda.
It becomes evident that strong brand awareness can lead to significantly more sales, and so by working with brand awareness long term, you can etch your company’s personality, logo, and brand into your customers’ head, and make them choose your product -not because you gave them an amazing offer or convinced them to buy, but because it’s branding and brand awareness.
Furthermore, brand awareness encourages repeat purchases and leads to greater customer loyalty.
Brand awareness is especially important in this day and age where technology is dominating our lives. Today, we are constantly bombarded with information, and as a brand, you have the ability to reach essentially everyone, anywhere in the world.
Within a matter of seconds, you can communicate with someone on the other side of the world, and if you can learn to leverage this tool called social media effectively, you have a tremendous opportunity to build your brand awareness using social media, and unfortunately, most brands are missing out.
Another benefit of building brand awareness is that it allows you to increase your market share if used correctly. The ultimate goal of brand awareness is to build it so successfully that when people think about your industry, they instantly think about you. Because when they do, it means that through your branding and brand awareness, you have been able to convince your audience that you are the expert and the leader of your industry. When people view you that way, you almost don’t have to fight with your competitors because you’re so clearly dominating the industry.
To demonstrate the power of strong brand building and branding, which brand do you think about when I mention:
- Electric cars? Most people will say Tesla
- Energy drinks? Most people will say Red Bull but some Monster because these are fighting head-to-head.
- Soda? Most people will obviously say Coca-Cola.
All of this demonstrates the immense power of branding and brand awareness. Just think about how this can benefit you as a brand when you are seen as the leader.
How to build brand awareness using social media
Decide your social media platforms
As with everything, in order to build brand awareness using social media, you need to lay a solid foundation first. The first set is to identify the social media platforms you are going to be active on.
The fact is that there are an insane number of social media platforms you an choose from if you just start scratching the surface. Sure, we have all the most-famous platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on, but there’s so much more to it than that.
Now, obviously, you simply don’t have the time, the energy or the resources to use every single social media platform that you can come across. In fact nor should you use all social media platforms you can find.
The natural thought for a starter is that the more social media platforms you use, the better results you’ll generate, however, this is not the case. First off, your resources are limited, and if you are going to juggle 5, 10, or even 20 social media platforms every day (unless you have enormous resources), it will mean that you’ll be spreading yourself thin. This will also mean that you’ll end up generate low results, or no results on many platforms, as opposed to dominating a few. And this isn’t something you want to do when looking to build brand awareness using social media, or working with any other marketing metric for that matter.
Second of all, your target audience isn’t to be found on all social media platforms. This is, of course, something very important when deciding which social media platforms to use. Every marketing effort you do as a brand is done for the purpose of reaching your target audience because these are ultimately the people who will become customers of you. And the problem is that you may use a social media platform and on paper generate amazing results, while in fact, none of the people are actually relevant to your business. Or, what is more likely to happen, you’ll go onto a platform, invest time and energy, and gain zero traction. Why? Because your target audience didn’t even use the platform!
This is why, before you begin working to build brand awareness using social media, you need to figure out which platforms your target audience is using the most. After all, it’s only your target audience that matters to your brand.
When identifying suitable social media platform for your brand, you should begin with the most common social media platforms and then work your way backward. This means begin looking at the user demographics of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and so on, and then, bring smilers once into the equation. The top social media platforms are most of the time relevant for most businesses because of their huge and often diverse user base.
Don’t exclude smaller social media platforms from the equation that may ”only” have 100M users, because it may very well be a platform where to majority of the users are in your target audience. After all, there’s a reason why promoting on online forums work so tremendously well, even though they just my have a few thousand or tens of thousands of users.
Just make sure that you don’t include too many social media platforms in your social media marketing strategy and that you do it too quickly. If you do, you’ll just get overwhelmed and struggle with managing them all. Sure, that a social media platform has a billion users sounds impressive, far more impressive than 200 million users, but if you factor in that you’ll never be able to reach 1 billion people, nor 200 million through your social media marketing efforts unless you have an enormous marketing budget. Additionally, you shouldn’t even want that, because the fact is that the vast majority of those people are most likely in your target audience anyway.
Start with the social media channels that will allow you to connect with your target audience the best. Start with a few, build a strong presence, and once you’ve done that, you can look at expanding your portfolio of social accounts.
What type of company are you?
Something that is worth factoring into the equation when choosing social media platforms is what type of brand you are because it’s not just about your target audience.
Different types of companies within different types of industries may need different ways to express themselves through content and reach their audience with it. For example, if you have a product that is very visually based that is best mediated through visuals, you obviously want to look at the social platforms that are driven by visual content, such as Pinterest and Instagram. If you, on the other hand, would benefit more from text-based content and can communicate better through text, Facebook and Twitter could be two good options.
How to build brand awareness using social media: Set up your accounts properly
Before digging into the nitty-gritty of working to build brand awareness using social media, we need to make sure we have a solid foundation to stand on, and once you’ve chosen the social media platforms to use in first hand, it’s time to set up your accounts properly to make them appealing and engaging. Doing this is a form of branding because your social media profiles will be the first thing that people see when they come across your profile. Just like it is an important part of the branding of how your storefront looks, it is an important part of the branding of how your social media profiles look.
If you haven’t gotten started with social media and you are starting from scratch, you need to set up all parts of your profiles, and if you have been using social media for a while, chances are, you need to update and refresh certain parts of your social media profiles.
Fill out all parts of your profile
When going to the settings of your profiles on the different platforms, there will be lines and sections which asks you to fill in various information to complete your profile. This includes things like contact information, profile picture, cover photo, and so on. Make it a priority to fill out all of these sections across your social media profiles. Referring back to your social profiles being the face towards the public and being many people’s first impression of your brand, just like you wouldn’t leave a storefront half-completed, you shouldn’t do it with your social media profile either.
The information you could fill out varies depending on the platform you use, but make sure you prioritize name, profile photo, and bio.
Be consistent
In branding, consistency is everything. This goes for you when working to build brand awareness using social media as well. In fact, being consistent is one of the most important, if not the most important aspect when working with branding, and visual branding plays a central role in that.
Consistency is crucial because, in order for you to build brand awareness, you need to repeat your message time and time over to your audience until eventually, they remember it, and associate it with your business – whether that be a jingle, your logo, your brand color, or your slogan. Branding covers so many different parts of the marketing process, and this is why you also need to pay attention to branding throughout your marketing process. For example, when you see this iconic red color, which brand do you think of?
Or, when you see this iconic symbol?
It’s easy, right?
despite the fact that one is focused on shapes and the other is focused on color. Two completely different elements that still allow customers to associate and think of a company.
But now to my point: How many times have you seen and been reminded of Coca-Colas iconic red color and thus learned to associate the color with the brand? Hundreds? I’d dare to guess several thousand times, if not tens of thousands of times throughout your life. This goes to show that in order to etch in a message in your customers’ brains, consistency is of the absolute highest importance. And this is the reason why you want to be consistent because it allows you to impact your audience with your message and your branding elements such as logo and brand name as many times as possible so that, eventually, they’ll start remembering you and the branding elements related to your brand.
Being consistent with your profiles
There are a number of areas where you should focus on consistency, and your social media platforms across different platforms are one of them. First off, make sure you keep your usernames on the various platforms that you use, consistent. Ideally, all your usernames should be the same.
If this isn’t possible because your username is already taken on some platform, use an almost identical username variation that is as close to the original as possible. The reason why you want to be consistent in your social media usernames is that it helps you build brand awareness using social media in a number of different ways. First and foremost, it helps with discoverability, because if I follow you on Instagram and I know your username, chances are that I will search for the exact same thing if I decide to look you up on another social media platform. Secondly, this is also great news because reaching people on multiple platforms enable you to continuingly etch your message into their brand and thus work to build brand awareness using social media – no matter if they’re on Twitter or Snapchat.
Build brand awareness using social media: be consistent with Profile pictures
An important element of your social media profile is your profile picture. It may very well be the first thing that people see when they come across your social media profile, but most importantly is that as a brand, you should have your logo as your profile picture, and you should have it consistently across all your social media platforms. That you should have your logo as your profile pictures on social media is a no-brainer when it comes to working to build brand awareness using social media.
The more times you can impact your audience with your logo, the greater the chances they’ll remember it – and getting people to remember your logo is one of the most important parts of branding and certainly one that you shouldn’t neglect. The reason is that the logo plays an important and central role in all brands’ way of portraying their business to the public.
Emphasise your bio
Another branding element that lays the foundation for the rest of your social media efforts is your bio. Your bio is a section in your profile where you tell people who you are and what you do in a few lines. The bios should be simple and to the point. The bio is especially important for people who are new to your business.
It is, therefore important that you keep it short and sweet and to the point. People should, in a matter of seconds know who you are and what you do. It should also be attention-grabbing so people stick around. This is ideal as the more messages you can reach them with, the greater the chances that they’ll remember you – in order the higher the chances of you driving branding results.
Additionally, you also want to add a link to your website in your bio, because doing so will enable people to learn more about your business.
Visual branding is everything
Visual branding is probably the most important part when working to build brand awareness using social media. In fact, visual branding is the most important aspect of branding as a whole. This might come as a surprise, but when you think about it, it really isn’t strange. Humans are visual creatures and tend to resonate a lot better with visual content than text. Furthermore, we also tend to process visual content better.
Here’s an example:
If I ask you to think about Pepsi, do you think about their colors in particular? Also, if I ask you to think about Mercedes, do you think about their iconic star logo?
That’s because visual elements are what people remember due to the fact that we are visual creatures, and it is also the DNA of all successful business. This is also the reason why, when working to build brand awareness using social media, you should emphasize the visual part greatly. In fact, it is the visual part of your branding that you want to put the most focus on because it is also here that you can make the biggest impact and leave the biggest mark on your audience.
The good news is that on social media, there are many different areas and things you can work with in order to ultimately increase people’s awareness about your brand.
The single most important visual element of your brand is your logo. Your second most important visual element is your brand colors. For McDonald’s, it’s an iconic yellow, for Coca-Cola, it’s an iconic red.
The first step in your visual branding is to make sure your profiles look consistent, and a great start in doing so is using your brand logo consistently. By making your accounts look visually similar and consistent, you create a connection, and this not only allows you to etch your message and visual brand identity into your audience’s brain but if your profiles aren’t consistent, what will happen is that it will create an immense disconnect, and you might risk losing people along the way because your profiles look like they belong to different companies.
Okay, so I’ve talked a ton about using consistent colors and logos, and so on, but how do you really know how to do this? By developing a visual theme for your brand, of course. Think of your visual theme as your brand’s personality but in a visual format. Sounds a bit crazy, right? It’s really not!
First off, begin by defining your brand’s personality.
How do you want your brand to be perceived by your audience and customers?
What type of personality do you want your brand to have?
It is crucial that your visual branding reflects your brand, the values it has, and the way you want to be perceived. The reason is that you want your target audience to resonate and relate with your brand as much as possible, and the truth is that it is not only the way you talk that plays a role in this because your visual branding says a lot about your brand as well. It is, however, more about perception and how people remember you as opposed to what you say
Filters
Using a filter and using it consistently is a simple yet effective way to build brand awareness. In fact a large share of brands choose a filter and then use it consistently in order to create a coherent content strategy.
Using filters is a great way to create a consistent visual theme on social media which will make it easier for people to instantly recognize your content on social media, thus increasing their awareness about your brand. Therefore decide on a filter that aligns with your branding strategy and the way you want to be perceived, and then use it consistently to also create a more coherent feed.
Build brand awareness using social media: Brand colors
A central role in your visual branding is your brand colors. You’re probably no stranger to the fact that the vast majority of brands, if not all brands have chosen colors that they use consistently, and incorporate as an important part of their brand identity. Again, Coca-Cola has their red, McDonald’s have their yellow, and so on.
The mistake many brands do, though, is that they just choose a color which they think ”looks good”, without much thought into it. The truth is that behind colors is a whole psychology, and this psychology shows that different colors evoke different emotions in us humans, and thus affect how we perceive brands. Again, remember that branding is first and foremost making your customers remember your brand, remember your personality,and remember your visual personality, but then, it is also about making all of those elements align with each other and making them showcase a brand personality that affects the way you are perceived and remembered by your customers.
With all of this in mind, you shouldn’t begin by choosing a color for your brand, but you should instead begin from the beginning by asking yourself the question mentioned above:
”How do I want your brand to be perceived by your audience and customers?”. When you have the answer to that question, you can start looking at which branding colors align with that vision. Accordingly, you should choose a color and then use it consistently across your social media channels. Remember, if you want people to associate your brand with a particular color, you have to reach your audience with it time and time over.
How will they otherwise be able to associate your brand with a color after having just seen it together with your company just one or two times?
And remember that this shouldn’t just stop on things like profile picture or cover photo. Your color should be part of all parts of your brand’s identity, no matter where in the funnel or process your social media audience and customers encounter your brand.
The more times they come in contact with your ported brand, the higher the chances of them remembering it – which means branding. Lastly, find ways to incorporate your brand color into your social media. Coca-Cola is undeniably the best example, as their iconic red color doesn’t just stop at their profile picture, but it is a central part of their visual theme.
Emphasize content
All social media platforms are driven by content, and so this means that content will undeniably be the most important part in order to successfully build brand awareness using social media. Have you ever tried generating results on social media without sharing any content? It’s quite hard considering the fact that it is centered around it.
But that’s not the point here. Sure, I could go on talking about how you should share a bunch of content etc, but in this article, we’re focusing on the branding aspect of social media, and this is also why I’ll be focusing on the different ways you can leverage visual content to improve your branding on social media.
Consistency is key
Okay. This obviously doesn’t come as a surprise considering the fact that just a minute ago, I talked about the importance of consistency in branding. When it comes to sharing your content on social media, consistency is important for many reasons. First off, in order to build brand awareness using social media, you need people’s attention. And the best way to get your audience’s attention is to share content on social media. As such, if you don’t share content on social media, you won’t have people’s attention, and this also means no branding.
Second of all, there are several parts of being consistent on social media. The fist is to share content consistently, which is tremendously important if you are hoping to build awareness, and secondly., you need to be consistent with the content you share.
First off, it is important that the content you share is focused on your industry and nice, and treats one main theme and niche. Lastly, and this is the most important part to build brand awareness using social media, is a consistency of specific elements in your posts that help make them coherent and instantly recognizable. Whether that is to incorporate elements of red like Coca-Cola or include your brand logo in the corner of each of your posts.
Some people misunderstand consistency and think that consistency means sharing similar and almost identical posts on social media, but this is far from what it means. What I mean by consistency is that your posts should carry a particular feel and vibe, and through small details, they should look coherent, while still being different.
Quality before quantity
No matter if you’re working with branding, social selling, or anything in between, don’t ever compromise quality for quantity.
The competition for being seen and standing out from the crowd is tougher than ever due to the simple fact that more people than ever use social media, including brands, and everyone is fighting for people’s attention. Sharing average content just isn’t enough to cut through the noise in today’s social media landscape.
What’s also crucial when you make your social media content a part of your branding is that you need to make your social media content immensely valuable. Having a value proposition will not only attract more people to you but depending on what content, it will also help you build your customer relationships, something that proves to be incredibly powerful in branding. But then again, it’s not very surprising when you onside the fact that the people who you have built the strongest relationships are the ones that have been able to impact you the most.
Best of all is that through your content, you can showcase expertise and knowledge, and this is something that contributes to your branding efforts in building a strong and honorable reputation.
In this, you want to decide how often and how many times you are going to post per day/per week across your different channels. Believe it or not but the number of posts you share and when you share them on social media also affects your brand awareness. How? Well, by posting consistently, you teach your audience when they can expect posts from you. Also, have in mind that whether or not the content you share on social is high quality will impact how your brand is perceived and remembered by your audience, and thus your brand awareness. Building brand awareness is great, but if, when people think about your brand, they think about low-quality photos and boring content, I think it’s safe to say that you’ve failed. building brand awareness is this not only about increasing the number of people who are aware of your brand and associate with various elements of your brand, but it is also about making sure your brand perception is positive as well.
Visual, visual, visual
I cannot emphasise the importance of visual content to build brand awareness using social media.
By now, you know That humans are visual creatures, is inevitable, visual content is where it’s at. Both for branding and for other marketing purposes. This means that in working to build brand awareness using social media, you need to think visual first, text second. After all, the vast majority of things that have to do with branding are visual based – from logos, to colors, and so on.
Your goal when working with branding is to impact your audience as much and as deeply as possible, and do this time and time over, so ultimately, they’ll remember the branding elements of your brand. And considering humans are visual creatures, this is undeniably the most powerful and effective method of building brand awareness with social media.
But with that said, don’t just throw around visual content just because you think that it will help you generate branding results, but more so, be extremely thoughtful in the visuals you use so they actually align with your brand, but most importantly, showcase elements that will help you with branding – from colors to logos, to themes, to how it influences how people perceive your brand.
Understand your target audience
The group of people that you hope to become more aware of your brand, and associate more with your brand is your target audience, and all your efforts are made for this group of people. As such, it is a very good idea to better understand your target audience so you can craft your messages more effectively, and reach and impact this group of people in a better way.
Not knowing your target audience and who they are is a big mistake as it means that you are operating in the blind. Understand your target audience better and you’ll be able to better craft your messages to them so they can both have a greater reach and a better impact. All-in-all a greater result for your brand awareness metric. The good news is that social media allows you to extract key information about what your target audience is saying, and this is information that is incredibly valuable in working to build awareness using social media.
To better understand your target audience, it is a good idea to work actively with social listening. Social listening means actively listing to what your audience is saying about your brand, but it’s also about understanding the personalities of your audience as well. Now, obviously, if you are going to communicate and interact with someone, you’ll find the most success when talking to them in a similar language. Obviously, if I am a brand marketing teens but I speak like an 80-year old they won’t resonate with me very well, and this also means that it won’t help me a lot in building brand awareness.
In order to continue to build brand awareness using social media, you need to take into consideration and factor in all the feedback that your follower’s come with. You can, of course
Many brands neglect to listen to the valuable customer feedback that’s right in front of their eyes if they would just take the time to listen because they just don’t understand how important this information is. Not only for a brand as a whole but in this case for brand awareness.
Through social listening, you get access to a ton of valuable information that ultimately will help you run a more effective strategy.
That you should listen to your target audience makes sense, because they are the reason you are using social media in the first place.
Lastly, make sure you also listen to the negative and not just the positive, because ultimately, this is what will help you improve.
This brings me to my next point…
Develop Your brand voice
Your brand voice is a crucial part of how you portray your brand and thus make your audience perceive it.
Think of your brand voice as your visual branding, but with voice instead. At its core, it is centered around the personality you have when you talk and the voice in which you talk to your target audience.
It is crucial that your brand voice perfectly aligns with your audience, because ultimately, this will help you build brand awareness using social media. When developing your brand voice, start at your audience.
- Who are they?
- What language do they speak in?
Your brand voice should be created so that it is similar or equal to the voice your audience already uses because what this will do is make your audience resonate with you better. The best part? They’ll remember you and associate your brand with the personality you have portrayed.
Of course, your brand voice doesn’t have to be anything special if that’s the brand image you want your brand to have, however, those brands that have chosen to go a little on the edge and dared to think outside of the box have seen tremendous success by using a brand voice which stands out and which they resonate with. The most common is Wendy’s and how they interact with their audience on social media, but many other brands have also found tremendous success in this.
Developing your brand voice isn’t that difficult actually. You have already defined the way you want to be perceived by your audience, so now, just make sure that your voice aligns with that.
Be authentic
Being authentic is a crucial point both when developing your brand voice but also when working to build brand awareness using social media.
Your goal with brand awareness is to get as many people as possible to know about your brand, but while also thinking about your reputation. While doing this, authenticity is everything. By being inauthentic to your audience, you’ll instead of building a positive reputation and memory of your brand, build a negative reputation for your brand, and trust me this isn’t a form of brand awareness that will help you a lot.
Never try to sound like anyone else – find your own unique voice. Stay true to your vision and goals.
Align yourself with your target audience – make sure they resonate with you but always remain true to yourself.
Customers think honest and authenticity is a crucial trait of brands. In fact, a study found that recent surveys, honesty is the number one trait consumers want from brands on social.
By being authentic, you walk down from the pedestal you’re standing on and make it easier for your audience to resonate with you. At the same time, you continue to develop and improve people’s perceptions of your brandö
Work to go viral
Of course, easier said than done, but that doesn’t mean you should try.
Social media is an incredible marketing tool, but that is nothing compared to the insane traction and results you can drive if you go viral.
First of all, by simply using social media, you increase your chances of going viral substantially, but there’s so much more to it than that.
If you go viral, it’s like putting your social media strategy on steroids and skyrocket your strategy. You’ll able to reach millions and millions of people, impact them with their message, impact them with your personality, and most importantly, etch your message into their brain to help build brand awareness.
Going viral has insane brand awareness benefits, but while we all wish that there was some secret formula to going viral, there’s not, and only a few brands and people will go viral every year.
The best part about going viral is that humans are group animals, and going viral is predicated on people sharing your content to create a wildfire effect. When someone sees that their friends have shared something, they tend to value it more. In fact, 92% of people trust peer recommendation. That’s far greater than the trust that brands carry. This is why it’s not always the best idea to stand there dan in and day out preaching your own message to build brand awareness using social media.
And this brings me to my next point…
Leverage and partner with influencers
First off, as I said humans have a high peer trust, but at the same time, the trust in brands is at an all-time low. In fact, According to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, only 48 percent of the general population in the United States trusts businesses. This is quite a significant decrease from the previous years when that number was at 58 percent.
On the flip side, social media influencers are considered peers, and people have an unbelievable trust in their peers. In fact, 92% of people trust peer recommendations.
What can you learn from this?
You can learn that rather than walking around yourself trying to build brand awareness using social media and to improve your reputation, why not have other, more trusted individuals to promote your brand instead? Because this will undeniably leave a greater impact on your audience and make a greater marketing effect.
I don’t think social media influencers need much of an introduction since it is a term we hear essentially every day on social media, but I’ll stick with the short backstory to give it some context.
Influencers are trusted individuals who have built a strong presence on social media and have established themselves as industry experts within their industry.
For brands, influencers have become more and more important, because marketers are always striving to be where the attention of their target audience is. And where is people’s attention in today’s landscape? That’s right, social media.
Instead of trying to scream your brand message without much success, you can instead have other people spread your message and drive significantly better results. At the same time, you’ll drive positive brand awareness and branding results, because influencers are well-respects and tend to have a sense of fame and celebrityship.
By partnering with influencers, you can amplify your message and reach a bigger audience. Make sure you identify individuals who are in the same industry as you because these will inevitably have the same audience as you, and then make sure you launch a campaign that comes off as trustworthy and engaging.
There are a ton of ways you can run an influencer marketing campaign, equally so when looking to build brand awareness using social media.
Identify suitable influencers, reach out to them, and think of a good idea on a campaign you can run together to engage people and make them remember your brand and its traits.
Interact With Your Customers
I cannot tell you how important this is.
Also, you’d be surprised at how many questions related to social media that engaging and interacting with your audience is the answer to.
It’s so important not to forget that social media is called social because you’re meant to be just that. The majority of brands forget this along the way, and what they do is they focus on selling, selling, selling, and sharing promotional content that doesn’t bring much value to their audience, only themselves.
Social media is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful customer relationship tool, and it gives you a direct channel to interact with your audience, but despite this, relatively few brands are using it and going all in on this marketing strategy.
If I could tell you one way to build brand awareness using social media, it would probably be this.
The reason is that humans are social creatures, and when we build a strong relationship with someone, including brands, we tend to become much more loyal to them, and we also tend to value them more. As a brand, this is obviously a good spot to be in, right?
Make it a habit to interact with your audience every single day, and don’t forget the important basics. Make sure that you respond to your comments, make sure you leave no messages unanswered, make sure that you ask questions, and show that you care.
The single most effective strategy for building brand awareness is customer loyalty, so focus on building it.
Go above and beyond with our Customer Service
Customer service plays an important part in your customer interaction and relationship building on social media.
Remember that your customer service is not just something you have to do when a customer hasn’t received their product or wonder when you will get a new batch of products, but rather, see customer service as an amazing opportunity for you to build your customer relationships and increase their loyalty. This, in turn, will lead to a significant boost in brand awareness as well as customer loyalty.
Know that more people than ever are reaching out to brands on social media for customer service, and not only should you have the resources to deal with the increased number of requests, but you should also see this as a tremendous opportunity to build your brand relationships because improved customer relationships mean greater brand awards.
Arrange contests/giveaways
This is a tremendous way to build brand awareness using social media. As the number of people and brands who are now using social media has skyrocketed dramatically, the competition for getting seen and cutting through the noise is tougher than ever. Something that tends to always work and is greatly appreciated by the audience is giveaways and contests. Of course, this isn’t a huge surprise considering the fact that we humans love free stuff.
Now, how can you leverage this to build brand awareness?
This is how:
Set up the contest so that for each share, your fans will receive a bonus entry in the contest.
By doing this, you’ll gain an immense traction and be able to reach a ton of new people and make them aware of your existence.
The better your prize is, the more people will be willing to do the things necessary to enter. As a brand, it is common to give away your own products, but the possibilities are of course endless.
With giveaways, you can boost your brand awareness and at the same time acquire new followers and future customers. Best of all is that when you encourage your audience to spread the message, you let your audience do the heavy lifting and all you’re going is giving away a price. Awesome, huh?
Use social media ads
As mentioned, the organic reach on social media has decreased heavily over the years due to introduced new algorithms, but most importantly, a skyrocket in the number of users and the content act is being shared on social media. As such, there’s just so much content than what can be consumed in the organic feeds. One way to increase your reach was to use giveaways, but you can only do these so frequently and they will only drive you so much exposure. With social media ads, it’s completely different
With ads, the people you reach is predicated on how much money you invest and how your ads are set up, and so this means that as long as you pay, you have the ability to reach hundreds of thousands of people, even millions. At the same time, social media ads, such as Facebook ads have proven to be able to help generate amazing results. The reason is that
These social media ads allow you to target your target audience based on a ton of different criteria. A such, in the end, you only pay to reach the people who truly matter to you. And let me tell you, that’s not what you do with traditional marketing.
Running social media ads is a great way to amplify your message, but most importantly for you, build brand awareness.
Encourage social sharing
The more people you reach, the more people you’ll make aware of your brand and can etch your message into, and thus build brand awareness. And one way to reach more people is by encouraging social sharing. By encouraging social sharing, you leverage the audience you already have to spread and amplify your message by sharing your posts to their very own audience.
Will this skyrocket your exposure? Probably not, but why not take advantage of it when it yields you marketing results and all you need to do is write a simple call-to-action?
Ask questions and engage your audience
Remember that social media is social. As such, you want to take every opportunity you can to engage with your audience. As a brand, you don’t just want to sit and wait for your audience to take action, but you also want to actively go out and encourage them to interact with you. Engaging and interacting is an important part to build brand awareness using social media because the more you interact with your audience, the more opportunities you’ll have to show your brand’s personality and to leave an impact.
As such, make it a habit to regularly ask questions to your audience to engage them and them to continue the conversations. Doing this will not only make them more engaged and loyal, but it will also help you establish a more powerful and human perception which is great for branding and brand awareness.
A study found that question posts get 100% more comments than standard posts on social media, and at the same time, asking a question is as easy as 123.
Leverage trends
Trends can be incredibly powerful when working to build brand awareness on social media.
If you’ve been using social media for a while, you’ve probably come across trends that have gained immense popularity, and then equally fast losing traction.
Trends on social media have short lives, however, if you jump on them before they get saturated and start dying, you can gain an immense exposure, and also build brand awareness as you’re showing people that you are up-to-date to the latest trends and are a relevant brand.
Best of all, though, is the traction and exposure you can get if you hop onto a trend just in the right time. To do this, you need to stay updated with what is happening and then be prepared to take appropriate action once you notice that a trend starting to appear. Make sure you’re early to the party because if you’re late, you’ll just get lost in the noise.
Measure and evaluate results, and act accordingly
As with all marketing efforts, you want to measure and evaluate your results after having worked to build brand awareness using social media.
It is only when measuring and evaluating marketing results that you will be able to know whether or not the campaign was successful, how you can improve, and what results you drove.
Difficult to measure brand awareness
Brand awareness is a tricky metric to measure as you probably know. I mean, how do you know how many people are aware o your brand? Do you go around asking everyone? And how do you know ”the extent to which consumers are familiar with the qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or services.”?
The good news is that opposed to traditional marketing, measuring the results from your marketing efforts on social media is now possible to do in a completely different way. For example, how do you know how many people looked at your billboard? Do you sit and count all the cars that pass by and then look to ensure that they’re actually looking at the billboard and not on the road?
Even if measuring marketing results on social media has become much easier over the years, brand awareness as a metric is incredibly difficult to measure, but that does not mean that it isn’t possible.
First off, since you’ve created campaigns for the purpose of brand awareness, you can begin by evaluating all the results from your marking efforts. By doing this, you ensure that you give your campaigns proper credit and you don’t say ”this campaign only generate these results”, and then, at the same time, you neglected enormous results just because they were generated within metrics that you didn’t take the time to measure.
Remember that it is only when you evaluate and measure results that you will be able to improve upon them. Obviously, if you go around thinking that you’ve run the best and most successful marketing campaign ever, while in fact, it was terrible, that’s not very good, is it?
For a complete and in-depth guide on how to measure the results of brand awareness, read How To Prove and Measure The Results of Brand Awareness on Social Media
Mentions
A great way to measure brand awareness is to look at mentions about your brand on social media. This also includes the number of people who have shared posts using your hashtags or shared user-generated content related to your business.
All of these things show that your audience is engaged and loyal, and they also show for a strong brand awareness and that people are familiar with your brand and your personality and culture.
Set goals
Before you begin doing any marketing efforts build your brand awareness, you should set goals for what you’re hoping to achieve. Select metrics that reflect increased brand awareness, such as brand mentions, and then define what you’re hoping to achieve within these metrics. Lastly, when it is time to measure your results, it’s easy to get started, because you only need to ask yourself ”have I reached my goals and objectives within these metrics?”. If yes, awesome! If no, how can you improve and make sure you achieve these results in the future?
Conclusion
Building a brand is a marketing strategy that is highly underrated. This is, of course, because building a brand is a long-term strategy, but most people work for, and want short-term results. because that is what shows that they have accomplished. But if you’re running a marathon and not a spring in business, you should always opt for the long-term strategy because it will be the most beneficial in the long run. And in that, building a brand is an extremely important one.
